Windows Server 8 Failover Cluster and Replica, Part 1

by Marin Franković on 24 January, 2012

Windows 8 Server brought lots of new and cool features to virtualization environment and I will show you two of those here. First of all, just small reminded that this is all done on Developer Preview version of server that can be downloaded from MSDN.

I will be using three server. One will be domain controller and iSCSI storage and two will be cluster nodes. First video explains how to create domain and add nodes to domain, since that part is changed slightly. There is no more dcpromo.exe command (there is but that is another story) and there are some configuration features that are not yet available in this release but may create problems (selection Windows 8 domain and forest mode).

Next step is to configure Hyper-V service on tow nodes that will be used in Failover Cluster later on.

After adding Hyper-V and restarting your server, we have to create cluster resources, such as disks and networks to be able to create and validate Failover Cluster.

In my next post I will show you how to do controlled and uncontrolled VM failover and also we will take a look at a new feature called Hyper-V replica.